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September 8–11, 2025
Atlanta, GA|Atlanta Marriott Marquis
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From operator to entrepreneur: David Garcia applies outage management lessons
David Garcia
If ComEd’s Zion plant in northern Illinois hadn’t closed in 1998, David Garcia might still be there, where he got his start in nuclear power as an operator at age 24.
But in his ninth year working there, Zion closed, and Garcia moved on to a series of new roles—including at Wisconsin’s Point Beach plant, the corporate offices of Minnesota’s Xcel Energy, and on the supplier side at PaR Nuclear—into an on-the-job education that he augmented with degrees in business and divinity that he sought later in life.
Garcia started his own company—Waymaker Resource Group—in 2014. Recently, Waymaker has been supporting Holtec’s restart project at the Palisades plant with staffing and analysis. Palisades sits almost exactly due east of the fully decommissioned Zion site on the other side of Lake Michigan and is poised to operate again after what amounts to an extended outage of more than three years. Holtec also plans to build more reactors at the same site.
For Garcia, the takeaway is clear: “This industry is not going away. Nuclear power and the adjacent industries that support nuclear power—and clean energy, period—are going to be needed for decades upon decades.”
In July, Garcia talked with Nuclear News staff writer Susan Gallier about his career and what he has learned about running successful outages and other projects.
Dirk Wilhelm, Leonhard Meyer
Nuclear Technology | Volume 71 | Number 1 | October 1985 | Pages 162-172
Technical Paper | Nuclear Safety | doi.org/10.13182/NT85-A33717
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The flow dynamics in the upper core structure (UCS) during the expansion phase of a liquid-metal fast breeder reactor core disruptive accident were investigated experimentally and numerically. A simulant material experiment was designed to verify some of the thermal-hydraulic models in SIMMER-II. The experiments showed the large effect of the heat transfer in the UCS and the relatively small effect of friction. The reduction of the work potential of the expanding fuel by the presence of the UCS is shown as a function of the initial pressure and the temperature difference between the core and the UCS, both for simulant materials and UO2 fuel. It is described how the experimental data can be extrapolated to prototypical conditions, which phenomena modeled in the code predictions of SIMMER-II are different for simulant and prototypical transients, and how the experimental results compare to effects of prototypical phenomena that could not be modeled in the experiment.
